Empty Space
“If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”
-Shunryu Suzuki
When my son Max was four, he asked me: “Was I at your and papa’s wedding?” I laughed and said, “No, Max. You weren’t born yet.” He considered this for a second. “So where was I then?” and then, in a flash, he answered his own question: “Oh! If I wasn’t born, I was dead.”
Fully satisfied, he went on with his afternoon while I spent mine in a kind of stupor because my four-year-old had just casually coughed up a central tenant of like, 90 % of all pre-monotheistic religions on his walk home from school.
Like most of us, I had gotten into the habit of answering my kids’ infinite (interminable) questions by “asking Google.” But after Max’s brush with reincarnation, I started having second thoughts. I started feeling that by feeding my kids’ curiosity with an immediate answer I was stifling the bonkers (or not so bonkers) explanations that they would come up on their own if left alone to think about it.
I started to wonder what effect our answers-on-tap world would ultimately have on human creativity.
***
I’ve been wanting to write about empty space for a while now and a recent New York Times piece by neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff (she studies curiosity) has given me the final push.
Also, it’s August. A month of Sundays.
Dr. Le Cunff’s article begins with the observation that due to the AI generated answers at the top of an internet query, we no longer click on the links below because we receive an immediate response to our question. She goes on to explain why this is problematic:
Curiosity, it turns out, is not just an individual’s desire to find out discrete facts; it’s also a feature of our biology designed to help us learn more broadly. And it requires a specific condition: a gap between what you want to know and what you find out.
Researchers have found that people in a state of curiosity, while waiting for an answer to an intriguing question, remember unrelated information they encounter during that time far better than they otherwise would.
…
In short, curiosity puts the entire brain into a mode of heightened receptivity — not just for the specific thing you want to know but also for everything around it. Curiosity opens a window, and while the window is open, learning deepens across the board.
My own interest in empty space, or what Dr. Le Cunff calls a “gap,” has not to do with curiosity exactly, but with creativity. And I think a similar principle is at work.
***
What Le Cunff’s curiosity gap and empty space share is a sense of latency, a quality of expectancy.
Yogic traditions, which understand the body and mind as distinct but not separate, situate creativity and sexuality in the same place: an energy center in the lower abdomen — the second chakra. In a cosmology where every breath has meaning, and every number an intrinsic quality, it is no accident that sexuality and creativity are related to the number two.
One is compact, concentrated, singular. But inherent in two is separation. For there to be two, there must be a gap. And in that empty space, energy and tension arise: Polarity. Attraction. Desire.
Sometimes, the yogic tradition explains, on difficult days (or months or years), we feel this gap to be a separation: from others, from the natural world, and for those with a spiritual belief, from God. We feel it as a longing to belong, to connect and to feel connected. A yearning. This yearning can arouse great sadness in us, fear even.
Yet, for the yogis, it is also the latent energy contained in the empty space that gives rise to human creativity in all its forms: Attraction and desire fuel our sexuality and aptly named procreation. We transform our longing into music and poetry, paintings and extraordinary mathematical equations.
***
The problem of empty space comes up regularly in my therapy practice. I see a lot of artists: writers, filmmakers, dancers, musicians and they voice a common concern: they don’t feel productive enough, and they’ve come to therapy wanting to work through their artist’s block.
I often ask them how they feel about emptiness. I ask them how much time they make for contemplation during a typical day or week. If they take naps on the weekend. I explain the virtues of doing nothing. I suggest Julia Cameron’s terrifying Artist’s Way challenge of going a week without reading (try it if you dare.)
It’s a hard sell.
It’s a hard sell because it goes up against a lifetime of rewards for doing, and very little reward for not doing.
Just the thought of sitting idle calls up the disparaging judgments we habitually place on idleness. I sometimes try to revive the conversation with something that seems smart and witty in the moment like: Think of yourself like a car! Your battery isn’t dead, you’re idling! Ready to take off to the next destination as soon as you put the GPS coordinates in!
The fact remains that it is very hard to override the entrenched belief that if we are not actively producing something, we are by definition being lazy. And my patients’ (self-defined) laziness is what they’ve come to therapy hoping to cure.
I’m going to bring in Pema Chödrön for a moment here on the subject of laziness, because she puts it so exquisitely:
“Laziness is not particularly terrible or wonderful. Rather it has a basic living quality that deserves to be experienced just as it is. Perhaps we’ll find an irritating, pulsating quality in laziness. We might feel it as dull and heavy or as vulnerable and raw.
…This process of experiencing laziness directly and nonverbally is transformative. It unlocks a tremendous energy that is usually blocked by our habit of running away. »
-- in “The Places that Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times.”
When we run away from our fear of “doing nothing,” we are in fact running away from the very conditions in which a fragile new idea or intuition can come into our consciousness and be seen or heard. In the same way that a gap between query and answer allows curiosity to blossom and learning to be imprinted on the mind, empty space allows new ideas to come into our field and take form.
But the moment our terror of emptiness sends us back to our screen for something to fill that space and occupy our mind, we revert to being the “expert” Shunryu Suzuki is talking about.
An expert on other people’s Instagram accounts.
***
Several months ago, an acquaintance here in France shared this observation with me: “Americans are always drinking something. They’ve all got one of those giant water bottles with a straw and are constantly sipping it.”
Now we Americans may have a particularly close relationship with water, but we are hardly the only ones constantly sipping on something. All over this great world we get very busy these days filling ourselves up with activity: socializing, gaming, buying, selling, gambling, checking our aptly named “feed”…
The problem is, when we fill up all our space, there is no oxygen left for a creative spark to catch fire.
Literally.
As a case in point, and thank you to my sister Emily’s recent NYTimes piece for the reminder: If you fill your vagina with a jade egg, it will be very hard to make a baby.
***
Non sequitur. Kind of. Has anyone else noticed that solutions to tricky problems come to you on the toilet? Am I the only one this happens to?
***
If we’re given any vacation at all, you can bet it’s because it serves some sort of important economic purpose. Luckily, just as described by Dr. LeCunff, a quick Google search turns up the following “AI Overview” so I don’t have to tax my curiosity too hard finding an expert opinion to back me up!
Stepping away from work and responsibilities also boosts creativity, prevents burnout, and helps you return to everyday life feeling refreshed and focused. (AI tags this answer “Alinna Health”)
***
OK! Time for me to get back to stepping away from work and responsibilities so I will sign off with a Big Bang (now that is some seriously empty space.)
Scientific breakthroughs, artistic leaps, technological innovation — these rarely emerge from efficient retrieval of known information. They emerge from periods of undirected exploration, when people follow questions further than they need to and find things they weren’t expecting. When the physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson detected a persistent hiss in their radio antenna in 1964, they could have written it off as equipment noise; instead, they kept asking what it might be, and they ended up discovering the radiation left over from the Big Bang.
- Anne-Laure Le Cunff “We are losing the ability to discover what we didn’t know to ask,” NYTimes, July 8 2026.
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